An Atheist Goes To Church 3

Guillaume Bignon was a French Atheist who was getting on with his life when he met an American girl whom he was interested in. The problem was, she was a Christian. So he set out to fix that problem. In the end, a problem was fixed but not the one he expected.

This is a classic example of this week’s memory verse in how man plans one thing and God does something else with it.
Here are some excerpts to whet your appetite to read the full testimony:

Her religious beliefs clearly remained the problem, and my new goal in life was essentially to explain to her why all this was untenable, so that she could put this nonsense behind her, and we could be together without her misconceptions standing in the way.

First Step Home

…my own unbelief was comfortably resting on the fact that (smart) people around me didn’t believe in God either, but it was more a reasonable life assumption than the conclusion of a solid argument. So I started to take the question seriously, to objectively assess its credibility. But of course, if I was going to refute Christianity, I first needed to know what exactly it affirmed. So I picked up a Bible to figure it out.

Second Step Home

…I figured there was at least one experiment that could be carried out to dis-confirm the belief that God exists: I thought “if any of this is true, then there is a God who exists right now and presumably cares greatly about this project of mine”, so I started to pray in the air as an atheist “If there is a God, then here I am, I’m looking into this, why don’t you go ahead and reveal yourself to me. I’m open.” Well, I wasn’t, really, but I figured that shouldn’t stop God if He existed.

So I read in the gospels about this Jesus of Nazareth. And there, it didn’t exactly feel like what I expected. I was impressed by the authority of that man’s teaching. Sure enough, I didn’t have much room in my worldview for his talks of God and supernatural activity, but I was rather impressed by the way he maneuvered in conversation, and the wisdom of some of his retorts. I could say what I want, this man knew what he was doing, he spoke with authority, and it made me somewhat uncomfortable.

…But all of this was nowhere near changing my view or my life habits. I couldn’t even visit a church had I wanted to, since all my weekends were busy traveling the country to play volleyball.

That barrier didn’t last long. A week or two after I started my investigations into Christianity and prayed that unbelieving prayer, out of the blue, my spiking shoulder started to fail me. For no apparent reason, without any accident or any evident injury, my shoulder would start to burn out 10 minutes into every volleyball practice. With that inflamed shoulder, I just couldn’t spike. The doctor couldn’t see anything wrong, the physical therapist’s best efforts didn’t help, and I was basically told: “look, you probably just need to rest your shoulder. You need to stop volleyball for a couple of weeks.” So against my will, I was now off of volleyball courts for a couple of weeks.

Final Step Home

Well, since I had been investigating this Christianity thing, I decided I would try and visit a church, to see what those Christians do when they get together.

…Frankly, I went to that church like I would go to the zoo: to see some weird exotic animals that I had read about in books, but had never seen in real life.

See “how God takes a French atheist who hates religion and makes a Christian theologian and apologist out of him” here.

Image©Kevin Tam